In many cases, desirable properties can be imparted to polycarbonates and other polymers by reacting together one or more aromatic dihydroxy monomers via melt or interfacial polymerization process to form polycarbonate homopolymers and copolymers. In such cases, it is often desirable to obtain random incorporation of the monomers along the polymeric backbone to achieve desirable physical properties. This can be difficult to achieve by melt or interfacial polymerization essentially due to the inherent difference in reactivity of the monomers. It becomes even more challenging when aromatic dihydroxy compounds are copolymerized with aliphatic diols which present, for example, secondary alcohols, such as for example cyclobutane diols, for which the pKa is greater than commonly use bisphenols. The efficient polymerization of such compounds involves a significant number of trade-offs. For example, one can compensate for low reactivity by altering the amount of catalyst introduced into the system, but the temperature and reaction time would lead inherently to lower optical properties of the final polymeric material (e.g. yellowness and transparency).
Thus it is clear that there is a need for compounds and methods of making them to convert cyclobutane diols, such as tetramethylcyclobutane diol (TMCBD) to bisphenols in order to improve their incorporation in final copolymers made thereby.